We are sharing this chapter of Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat by Katie Hodgetts for members of our Hopeful Book Club.
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Chapter 15
To truly sustain this work – and ourselves – we need to rethink one of the most powerful forces that shapes our motivation: what it means to win. It can feel counterintuitive, even disheartening, to keep showing up for something as vast and complex as “positive change” without clear, immediate wins. We sign petitions, join marches, change our consumption patterns, have tough conversations with loved ones and still the headlines feel catastrophic. There is a strong temptation to define progress in binary terms: success or failure. A law passes or it doesn’t. Your political party wins or loses. We’re good or we’re screwed. But affecting change, like any deeply human endeavour, lives in the subtleties. Often, the most powerful transformations and cultural shifts are the ones that no one sees.
A Holistic View of Action
The first step in redefined winning is to expand our definition of action, beyond protests, pickets and politics. Typically, action for a positive world has been confined to traditional activism. But what if action could include the large and small acts of hope and humanity that counter the very systems we are trying to transform – systems built on separation, domination and despair? In this framing, radical actions include those that override the defining features of the permacrisis: loneliness, competition, individualism, materialism, convenience, greed, apathy. Actions become offerings to the world we are trying to usher in. In social movement theory, the idea is known as “prefigurative politics”, which is simply to be the change you want to see in the world. Actions taken prefiguratively include:
- Showing up to a community event when your instinct is to isolate
- Choosing to stay curious when judgement would be easier
- Having a hard, heartful conversation with a relative about how their opinions might make life feel unsafe for others
- Choosing not to numb out when the news gets heavy
- Gently refusing to disconnect
- Attending a summit, event or conference where you’re connecting to something bigger than yourself
- And (one of my strongest resolves) talking to the cashier at the check-out instead of opting for self-service because it might be the first meaningful conversation someone has had the whole day
Through intentional acts of resistance we can disrupt individualism and defy the erasure of non-materiality, such as community, spirituality and love. When we expand our definition of what it means to take action, we simultaneously increase the opportunity for winning. Rather than a win only being something we’ve pushed for for years, like legalized abortion, it expands to include every To win is to interaction of female empowerment feel possibility. you’ve offered to yourself and others.
In this reframe, we can win more
frequently. And when we win more often, we feel more hope, because hope is a verb, a doing word.
If winning goes beyond protests and pickets, the door opens for more people to participate. If action only looks like shouting en masse (I say this as a shouter myself), most people might assume they’re not cut out for it. But if it also includes courageously tabling a justice topic at work or setting up an activism wellbeing support group, or a book group for conservationists, suddenly there’s a clearer pathway for engagement. Then the positive feedback loop begins: more winning; more hope; more people offered a way to engage. More people, more winning, more hope. Repeat. To win is to feel possibility, and I’m taken by the transformational power of a heck of a lot more people feeling it.
Our expanded definition of action is not to excuse ourselves from the larger types of action that feel more uncomfortable. We aren’t chatting to a stranger to excuse ourselves from decolonizing our campaigns. Expanded winning is not switching off. It’s appreciating the manifold forms of positive impact we can pursue. Not only does this expose surfaces for victory, but it illuminates how each and every one of us has the capacity to be a changemaker. Reframing action isn’t about lowering the bar but about changing the rules. In this framing, “Well, I’ve done my bit for today”, becomes, “Where else can I do my bit today?” As onlookers we stop shaming others for not doing enough but celebrating them for doing something.
The real beauty of this mindset shift is that we won’t see it on the news – in fact, we might not see it at all. We don’t know how talking to a stranger with curiosity and interest might change the trajectory of their whole day, week or even their life. You don’t know the impact of how your decision to slow down and care for your nervous system becomes permission for someone else to do the same. These victories aren’t tangible. Change becomes the ripples far beyond our comprehension, which decentres our ego, as we can’t as easily claim our virtue or share our action on Instagram. To truly usher in a new world, our changemaking needs to be led by the ecosystem, not by the ego-system. Moments of courage and care matter just as much. Sometimes they matter more.
Reframing both winning and action to be how we show up in the world means that impact doesn’t end when the campaign wraps or the grant runs out. It continues in how you move through grief, how you create joy, how you honour boundaries and how you show up – especially when no one’s watching. Over time, the tools we practise in the eight-week model start to weave into the rest of our lives. We bring this mindfulness into how we parent, lead, rest and relate. We start to ask deeper questions about what kind of world we’re creating in our workplaces, our friendships and our personal habits. The work is no longer compartmentalized. So, the real victory, beyond the big and small acts, is integration. Not just policies passed (though we celebrate those), but the healing of our relationship to life itself. What if we redefined changemaking not as conquering, but as alignment? Returning to our values again and again, even when the outcomes are uncertain? What if our metric for success is our ability to stay present, to adapt, to stay in the room when it’s hard and to do so with a sustained conviction that we do this because it’s right, not because it’s easy. These lessons don’t just sustain changemaking, they become changemaking.
